


cast to the heavens;

by sayanora_fallinlove



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Astronauts, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 09:23:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6000739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sayanora_fallinlove/pseuds/sayanora_fallinlove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His life circles into numbness and rage, until he meets her; a story in a collection of moments. Kylo-centric astronaut AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cast to the heavens;

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lilacsandlostlovers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsandlostlovers/gifts).



**One.**

There are stars above his bed, some smaller, some larger, all arranged haphazardly on the ceiling. His mother tells him that they soak up the light all day so they can glow yellow for him at night, and he grows up thinking that all stars are five-pointed and made of plastic. Compared to the beautiful planets pained across his walls, they are much less impressive. 

But it is the stars he looks at every night before he sleeps, forming shapes in his mind.

It is the stars that keep the darkness away.

 

**Two.**

Ben stands at the front of his first-grade classroom, a wide smile plastered across his face, all childhood and innocence.

“I wanna be an astronaut when I grow up!” he proclaims loudly, holding his uncle’s hand. “I’m gonna fly spaceships and rockets just like my grandpa and my uncle!”

And Luke, the astronaut turned professor, smiles beside him and squeezes the little boy’s fingers.

**Three.**

He does not remember when the arguments start, when they end. He does not remember when his dad leaves for good, when his mom gets promoted and starts needing to put in extra hours.

He only realizes one day that there is only the two of them now, and that he is a big boy, he should be studying, his mom has work to do.

The stars glow dimly on his ceiling. Some have fallen off.

  

**Four.**

  
It is just as much rage as it is sorrow, and Ben comes home seething, ready to break anything in his path. Hot tears leak from the corners of his eyes. Leia rushes to him, takes him into her arms and he can hear her voice softly in his ear, asking him what’s wrong.

“Is it true?” he bites out, cursing the way the way his voice cracks. “That grandpa was evil? That he killed people?”

He feels Leia stiffen and pull away, sees the expression on her face, and does not stay to hear her answer. Ben storms upstairs, slams his door, and throws himself onto his bed. Sobs wrack his body, and he is desperate and angry at himself for being so emotional. This is about more than his grandfather. He pretends to be asleep when she pushes his door open a few hours later, tucked beneath his blankets with back towards the door.

He is thirteen.

Ben does not cry after that night.

 

**Six.**

It is two in the morning. His thoughts are spinning madly. When he is sure his mother has gone to sleep, he turns on his computer and opens a web browser. His fingers move of their own accord.

_Anakin Skywalker,_ he types in. He clicks the first link.

And reads. And _reads._

 

**Seven.**

_They lied to me! They all – all of them, liars, they were_ wrong!

_He’s not a traitor –_

_And it makes sense now, why mom said – why uncle Luke denied – and dad – and – and –_

_The kids at school, calling me –_

**Eight.**

His high school years pass in the blink of an eye. He does not talk to his mother or uncle; he does not talk to anybody. By the time the benefactor reaches out to him with an offer, a strange calmness has settled over his life. And just beneath, a simmering rage that never dies down.

(He lashes out sometimes, when he gets bad news, when he ventures at something and fails. He hates himself for the outbursts, but does not regret coming to be known as a force to be reckoned with.)

Ben graduates at the top of his class, with no friends and the chance at a full scholarship to study aerospace engineering paid for by a mysterious figure that only stipulates he must continue to study well. The benefactor drops words like _legacy_ and _birthright,_ and makes promises of access to pilot training, of exceptions to rules and a fast ride to the top.

Promises of going to space.

And he is just a boy, eighteen, defiant, and the stars flash before his eyes, an opportunity to prove his mother, his uncle, _everyone,_ wrong, a chance to get the thing he’s wanted since he was a child, before everything broke apart, _before they all started lying to me –_

He cannot help it.

 

**Nine.**

His things have long since been packed, whatever meager belongings still held meaning. They ask him his name when he moves overseas.

He hesitates, stutters, then finally mutters, “Ben.”

It does not feel right.  

 

**Ten.**

He flashes through university – takes upper-level classes, studies more hours in a day than he sleeps. Snoke sings praise but drops hints, reminders, that he has expectations to live up to. The shadow of his grandfather hangs over him all the time. He only pushes himself further. Ben finishes his degree a year early and dives straight into flight training.

He meets the arrogant prick on his first day. Hux is two years older and sharp as a whip.

He is also infuriating. And, of course, the universe pairs them up constantly for flight exercises.

Somewhere, in a corner of his mind, he realizes that it’s too easy. Snoke is helping him. Snoke is drafting him from school to training, to what will soon be a job. He crushes those thoughts before they can take hold.

 

**Eleven.**

The colour fades from his world slowly, in increments. He does not notice it at first – not for years, though he suspects it must have begun somewhere in his last year of high school – until suddenly he is on the roof of his apartment building in the middle of the night, bags under his eyes from lack of sleep, and there are no blues or greens anymore. Yellows and oranges and purples are dull.

He looks at the night sky. Cloudy.

He cannot see the stars.

 

**Twelve.**

It doesn’t take long for Hux to realize his relations to Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and mock him for it.

He punches Hux in the jaw and calls Snoke. It only takes one well-placed request, and his name is changed – but the next two months of his life are hell. Snoke cuts him off and charges him the bill for Hux’s medical expenses. 

It’s only then that he realizes Hux is also under Snoke’s protection.

  

**Thirteen.**

Ben dies the day he looks at his hands and sees a flash of red, then nothing.

Kylo Ren is born.

 

**Fourteen.**

  
He gets screened and chosen for the First Order Space Agency on his first application. It’s a highly publicized affair. He is the youngest applicant ever selected, and one of the most highly qualified.

(He throws a fit when Hux is chosen as well. Only the knowledge that he outranks the ginger calms him.

He knows Hux hates him for it.)

 

**Fifteen.**

Kylo Ren flies ten missions to space in the span of five years. He rises to Commander faster than anyone else in the history of the Space Agency. At age thirty, he is a highly decorated, capable pilot and astronaut.

So why does he feel empty? Why can’t he sleep at night? Why does he wake up sweating, breathing heavily, clawing off the sheets like they strangle him? He thinks back. He cannot remember a time before before fear and insecurity motivated him. Before rage consumed him.

He cannot remember the last time he looked at the stars.

Kylo Ren realizes that he has nothing. He is powerful, and in command, and he has _nothing._

 

**Sixteen.**

And then he meets _her._

 

**Seventeen.**

She is small and tough and a force of nature. He is called into an emergency meeting. She sits, back straight, lips pressed together, at the end of table beside Snoke. They have a month to prepare for a three-month-long mission to the International Space Station to perform emergency repairs. Kylo listens to people talk but he hears none of what they say. There is a pounding in his head, dull but persistent, and he cannot focus.

What registers is her voice, smooth and resolute before he snaps out of his chair and leaves the meeting. He has heard her voice before, he knows it. 

 

**Eighteen.**

As it turns out, Rey Kenobi is a fantastic pilot. In their single flight simulation together, shortly before takeoff, she wipes shows exceptional skills that even outdo his own. 

He does not show it – his face is a cool mask of indifference and disinterest – but inside he seethes. She laughs at him and it takes all he has not to punch the wall right there.

She is like a memory from a dream – so close his fingertips can brush it, and just out of reach. 

 

**Nineteen.**

He does not have time to get to know her before they depart. The journey is smooth; they reach the Space Station with no issues, and Rey sets to work immediately.

“Payload specialist?” he had asked her before liftoff.

“You find it hard to believe?”

“You look too young.”

“I’m twenty-seven.” Kylo had said nothing, and Rey had smiled wryly. “But thanks for the compliment.”

 

**Twenty.**

As Kylo’s headaches get worse, so does his mood. He lashes out at his crew – and because she is new, because he does not know how but he feels like she is the source of this pain, he lashes out at her especially.

She shoots him down, and as Kylo only grows angrier, Rey grows more unimpressed.

“It’s not _me,”_ she tells him plainly at the end of their first month aboard the station. “You’re just mad, Commander. You need someone to let it out on.”

In his years of service, no one has dared talk back to him so bluntly. He wants to rip her hair out. He wants to rip his own hair out. He wants to open the pressurized hatch and throw himself into space.

So he stalks away from her, and does nothing.

 

**Twenty-one.**

His world has been monochrome for years.

That night, he sees a flash of blue. Brilliant, brilliant, it streaks across the landscape of his dreams and fades to nothing.

 

**Twenty-two.**

_You’re just mad, Commander. You’re just mad. You’re just mad. You’re just – you’re just – you’re just – mad, mad, mad, mad –_

_But when haven’t I been mad?_

Kylo sits on the edge of his cot, face in his hands. _When haven’t I been mad? When did everything turn black and white?_

He stops being able to sleep.

 

**Twenty-three.**

“Kenobi.”

“Yes, Commander?”

“I’m – ahem. Sorry. For last week.”

A small hesitation, then she smiles brightly.

“Don’t worry about it, Commander.”

She turns to go back to work and he swears he sees green burst from every step she takes.

He can’t remember the last time he apologized to someone.

 

**Twenty-four.**

They start talking. It’s little bits and pieces at first, a few words here and there between work. Then it’s snippets of conversation over meals. They sit down across from each other in silence – he, not knowing what to say, she, content to let him take his time. She is almost always the one to initiate either way. It’s just talk of the station and their training and piloting experience; nothing personal, nothing emotional. But slowly, they develop a sort of routine, and soon she does not wait, simply dives into conversation. She’s always the more comfortable of the two of them. Kylo does not know what to do with the flashes of colour she brings, but decides that he does not mind them.

 

**Twenty-five.**

She discovers his insomnia the same time he discovers hers. Their conversations go from minutes to hours. Rey talks all week – about her childhood, her home, her best friend. She laughs and even though she is bone-tired, she stays to talk to him, to _open up_ to him. And at the end of their second month, inexplicably, Kylo opens up to her.

“My grandfather was Anakin Skywalker,” he blurts out. “I used to have stars on my bedroom ceiling. I’ve wanted to be an astronaut since I was a child. I haven’t been home in years.”

Kylo Ren talks and paces and spills himself out to her, and his head hurts and something is telling him, _it’s her, it’s her,_ but he doesn’t know _what_ and he’s lonely, he’s _lonely,_ and angry and she is fascinating – fascinating, endless, and tough, and she doesn’t take any of his bullshit, doesn’t let him have his way –

And when he rages at her – and, god, he does, he rages, because he does not know how to handle this feeling, has not seen colour like she brings to him in so long, he knows nothing but to rage – she looks him steady in the eyes and says –

“Commander Ren – _Kylo.”_ His breath hitches at the sound of his name on her lips. “Why are you here?”

He hesitates. “I don’t know. I used to love the stars. And now I’m among them, and I feel nothing. _Nothing.”_

Rey considers him for a long moment.

“You’re so angry, Kylo,” she says at last. “You’ve been numbed by your rage. But listen. _Listen._ We are born with our feet on the ground and our eyes cast to the heavens. We are made of stardust, all of us.” Kylo watches, frozen to the spot, eyes wide, as she reaches out to take his hand in hers. “We are celestial creatures. You are not among the stars, Kylo. The starts are inside _you._ There is so much more inside of you than your anger. Never forget that. _”_

He feels her fingers trace the edge of his knuckles and looks into her eyes. There is green in them, and an invitation in her smile, saying, _I’m here for you; there's no need to be angry, you can trust me._ He thinks of his bedroom ceiling and understands.

It is still the stars that keep the darkness away – the ones inside him, and around him, that guide and heal.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, here you go, lilacsandlostlovers! I really liked the "celestial" prompt, so I tried to roll with it. It's not really fluffy, but I hope you like it. Also, please pretend I didn't completely muddle up the science and process for becoming an astronaut. I did some research, but none of the guidelines were too specific so ??? I just kinda went with it. Imagine more futuristic space-travel. Not like SW level, obviously, but think like "The Martian" level of futuristic. Anyway, thanks for the great prompts, sorry for the slightly-after-midnight delivery, and Happy Valentine's Day! :)


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